1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computer method and system for connecting to a fixed network and, more particularly, to a method for connecting mobile users to the Internet.
2. Description of Related Art
The Internet came into being in its current form in 1983 when all the computers connected to ARPANET—a military network—began using the same communication protocol. In 1986 ARPANET became NSFNET in a bid to link the USA's supercomputers. E-mail began to be commercially available in 1990 at much the same time that Mosaic—the first worldwide web browser—became a useful product. The Internet, comprising mainly the WWW (world wide web) and e-mail is now an extremely important business tool.
The world is now networked, much of this provided by TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), but ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) is still dominant in telecommunications. Most major companies have access to the Internet and the Internet backbone runs thru much of our environment. This infrastructure is made up from largely fixed, rigid connections: wires, routers, switches, and similar.
Human beings tend to move around when engaged in work and leisure. An easy way to connect to the fixed network is needed for these mobile users. Mobile users are commonly envisaged as people using a cell phone or other radio device, but for our purposes a “mobile user” is anyone away from their fixed home base.
It remains difficult for a mobile user to obtain a high bandwidth connection to the Internet for two reasons:                1. Wireless connections are inherently expensive as they use a rare resource—radio frequency spectrum—and require large infrastructure investments.        2. There are practical difficulties when away from home base, such as determining IP addresses, proxy server settings, negotiating billing and payment and security and privacy concerns.        
Even the simple task of moving from one office to another within the same company can be fraught with complications and more often than not people fail to make connection when traveling away from home base. With so many companies relying on e-mail and the World Wide Web as a critical business tool, an inability to connect can prove costly to companies. In the last three years the ability to access the Internet has begun to migrate to mobile devices. Small mobile devices have tended to use a variety of specialist Internet access methodologies with varying degrees of commercial success. They all suffer from the limitation of low bandwidth and high cost.
There are a number of methods by which users can get access to data from mobile wireless devices: SMS, HDML, WAP, and I-Mode being the main standards. All of these standards suffer to some extent from problems such as limited bandwidth and complex authoring environments.
In SMS (short message service), users can send and receive simple, short text messages from their phone. A server at the mobile phone service either routes them to other mobile phone users or provides a gateway that translates the messages and sends them as e-mail to Internet e-mail services. The gateway will also translate incoming e-mail and send it to the user in SMS format. Although rudimentary, large successful businesses have been founded from sending these short messages demonstrating that people need data on the move and are prepared to pay for it.
In HDML (Handheld Device Markup Language), a web site is composed using specially modified tags. A wireless gateway translates these tags so that the mobile device may view them. A mobile device equipped with a micro browser capable of interpreting HDML can display this information on a small LCD.
In WAP (wireless application protocol), a web site is composed using WML (wireless markup language) and this information sent to a WAP gateway. The user gains access to this gateway either by dialing a RAS (remote access server) or by using a packet based system, commonly referred to as “always on”.
In I-Mode, specialist tags are again used to create pages formatted in compact-HTML. These are served over a gateway to users on a packet-based system.
In the above systems a specialist gateway is used to provide output formatted for mobile devices. An alternative method of accessing the Internet from a mobile device is provided by fixed wireless systems such as Bluetooth and the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN standard.
In the 802.11 and Bluetooth standard, two wireless devices establish a point to point or point to multi-point link using spread spectrum radio technology. The two wireless devices can be any type of electronic appliance (e.g., PC, PDA, Cell phone, microwave oven, home security system). This link replaces wires and does nothing to reformat the content of data.
Another wireless standard that has reached ubiquity in availability, but has very little usage, is IrDA (Infrared Data Association). In the IrDA standard two devices with IrDA capability positioned near one other can communicate using infra-red beams. The standard suffers from two problems. Firstly, the link is optical and therefore requires a clear line of sight. The devices must be positioned so that their ports are visible to each other or at least so that sufficient reflected light reaches the ports. Secondly, the two computers need to have their IrDA ports configured and switched on. This is a non-trivial task. The hardware must be enabled—commonly power saving and compatibility issues mean that computers are shipped with the port disabled. A device driver must be installed. Once the physical link is available a logical link is needed to allow file transfer or access to the hard disk of the companion computer. Security and privacy must be ensured.
Looking at problems of getting Internet access when mobile a number of steps are required:                1. Some form of driver software is needed to configure the user's hardware to allow a link to be made.        2. The physical link needs to be made. This may be by pointing the two computers at each other or connecting a back-to-back USB cable, which has been provided by, for example, the hotel at which the user is staying.        3. The host user needs to enable and share certain services, such as printers and hard disks and network connections.        4. The host user needs, itself, to log onto the Internet.        5. The host user needs to act as a gateway for the connecting user, translating and forwarding packets onto the Internet.        6. The IP address of the host's interface needs to be configured to a non-conflicting address with that of its Internet link.        7. The IP address of the connecting user needs to point to the host user.        8. The ports and proxy servers need to be set up. Even if no special set up is required, a user who normally works in a corporate network with special settings will need to write these down and then delete them from the system, remembering to type them back in when returning to the corporate environment.        9. If the link has a cost to it, a financial transaction needs to be entered into with metering and billing.        10. No simple solution is available to ensure a secure link.        11. E-mail may or may not require yet more steps to enable.        
This multi-step process is fraught with difficulties and there are numerous potential points of failure. Most connections fail because either one of the steps cannot be completed, or each step is so time consuming that the user gives up before completing the task. Since mobile users are usually short of time, have limited resources (such as driver disks, spare cables) and have to configure multiple times as they travel thru different environments, the effort is very frustrating. Typically the above exercise is completed around 30% of the time with a mean time of effort of two and a half hours. Although many operating systems (such as Windows 2000™) allow connection sharing the implementation of these makes the task very complex.
An additional further complexity has been generated by the lack of interoperability between IEEE 802.11 and Bluetooth. Since both standards operate in the same frequency spectrum the two systems will tend to interference with each other.
Additional difficulties occur when a firewall is present. If a shared connection is obtained in the home or office, access to the Internet may be blocked or restricted by the activities of a firewall. The same technology that provides the firewall capability may also track usage and web sites visited providing a risk to privacy. Additionally, information that is sent or received may be logged causing considerable security risk.
Although the cellular system provides some degree of roaming, it provides no solution to inter-system roaming and uses expensive infrastructure, which results in high call cost. In addition, the process of connecting a PC or PDA to a cell phone is complex and requires considerable reconfiguration of the device.
The current mode of access to the Internet is predominantly through a one-to-one commercial negotiation. Each person has a connection to the Internet via their own ISP. When visiting someone else's home obtaining access to the Internet is difficult. Calling the ISP requires another phone line. In the case of ADSL or cable systems, the MAC address of the network adaptor is registered to the ISP so that a second user can't use the connection. You can install a network and enable connection sharing in your OS (for example Windows 2000™), but this involves a number of complex steps. In addition there are significant security implications to this. Generally home and commercial networks are not set up with the anticipation that roaming users will be physically connected to the network inside the Firewall. Thus many network services are not secured against internal access. (It is not uncommon for a corporate network running Windows™ 2000 to have numerous hard disks shared without passwords.) Although the firewall blocks this from external access, a local connection would be inside the firewall.
Although these problems have existed for some time, the emergence of Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11 are encouraging people to connect more often.
While the above discussion is centered on the difficulty of human beings obtaining connection to the Internet, it should be bourn in mind that autonomous machines have similar difficulties. Much talk is made of microwave ovens, video recorders, and refrigerators talking together using home networks. It is also envisaged that automobiles will be similarly equipped. These systems are likely to become ubiquitous over the next five years as networking capabilities are built into appliances. These devices need to obtain services from somewhere and need to obtain a connection to the Internet. It will be prohibitively expensive to give each device its own dedicated connection. The devices will also need services tailored to them. One can consider that an appliance once manufactured and shipped becomes a roaming device in need of connection to the Internet.